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Glossary/GPU/Frame pacing

Frame pacing

Frame pacing is how evenly frames are delivered over time, and poor pacing feels like stutter even when the average frame rate is high.

Also known as frame consistency, frame delivery

Measured by SystemCheck

Part of the four-stage run: a 60-second sustained CPU load reporting throughput, decay and consistency; a memory stage reporting bandwidth and latency; a calibrated GPU raster load reporting frame time, pacing and decay; and a path tracer reporting samples per second. The paragraphs below say which metric carries this term.

Well-paced output means each frame arrives at a near-constant interval. Poor pacing means frames bunch and gap. The average is unchanged but the eye perceives judder, because human motion perception is far more sensitive to variance in interval than to the interval itself.

Common causes are CPU and GPU falling out of step, shader compilation stalls on first encounter with an effect, asset streaming from disk, VRAM eviction, background processes stealing time, and driver-level frame queuing. Some are fixable by the user, some by the developer, and identifying which requires seeing the timing distribution rather than an average.

SystemCheck reports frame-pacing stability from its raster stage and delivery consistency from its path-tracing stage. Both are computed from the distribution of measured intervals on a fixed workload, so a poor result on an unchanging load points at your system (thermal decay, contention, or driver behaviour) rather than at scene complexity.

Related terms

Frame timeFrame time is the milliseconds taken to produce one frame, and it describes smoothness far more accurately than an averaged frames-per-second figure.Read more1% lowThe 1% low is the frame rate of the slowest 1% of frames, capturing the stutters that an average frame rate hides entirely.Read moreConsistency scoreA consistency score summarises how evenly a system delivers performance across a run, separating steady machines from ones that are fast on average but erratic.Read moreBackground load contaminationBackground load contamination is other software consuming CPU, GPU, or memory during a benchmark, depressing and destabilising the result.Read moreDriver overheadDriver overhead is the CPU work required to translate rendering commands into GPU instructions, which can bottleneck a fast GPU paired with a slower CPU.Read more
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